First Colony Video: Domestic Artifacts

Hygiene

Higiene

Transcript

Sometimes artifacts can tell us about things like domestic life and health practices that just aren't recorded in documents. Chamber pots, for example, are found in most of the Spanish sites in Saint Augustine. We've dug many of these sites and have never found a Spanish latrine or a Spanish privy, and instead, people used these chamber pots, probably taking them out in the morning or whenever they needed to, to dump in the garden. Small pots were made in Mexico in an Aztec tradition starting in really the 16th century. These were called Guadalajara polychrome, and they were made of a special kind of clay called bucaro which when was damped it gave off an aroma. Spanish women came to believe that this bucaro clay had cosmetic properties, and they were exported by the thousands to Spain so that women could have water in these pots and then use it to improve their complexions. And it's also documented that women would eat the bucaro clay, that it was believed to have properties for health and beauty.